Protocol 7 (7 page)

Simon nodded. “Let me think about it,” he said. “And let me make one more call on this old, bad phone. Then you can dispose of it for me.”

“All right, then,” Andrew said.

Simon dialed the number from memory. It was answered immediately.

“Hey,” he said to the voice on the other end. “It’s me. Are you free this evening? Seven o’clock or so?” He paused for a moment, nodding into the phone. “Yeah, I’d rather talk about it face-to-face. Just a little project of mine you might be interested in.”

The voice on the other end was Ryan. “Nice to hear from you stranger—didn’t recognize the number…you alone or should I expect a guest?”

“Maybe a few…” said Simon.

“A few? Well then, a few for dinner,” Ryan said.

“Dinner it is,” said Simon, ending the call.

“Was that Ryan?” Andrew asked.

Simon nodded. Their colleague, Ryan, was one of the foremost experts when it came to Remote Access Intervention.

“I’m glad to hear that,” Andrew said, “Because not too many people can manipulate remote satellites like he can.”

Simon looked at the beaming college student one last time. “Okay,” he said and handed him the phone. “I’ll think about it. I’ll think about you coming along.”

Andrew spread his hands. “What more could I ask?” he said. “I’ll be waiting for your call. On that phone, of course.” He grinned again. “I mean, you can’t be too careful.”

Jonathan Weiss stood under the main surveillance camera in the Capitol South Metro Station and waited for the train that would take him to the airport. It was one of the least photographed spots on the subway platform, and he found himself there more out of force of habit than anything else. He knew he was still visible in half a dozen ways, including the cams in the kiosks, the ones mounted on the train, and any personal imagers on commuters who wandered by, but it made him feel better, somehow. Inconspicuous. Out of sight.

Jonathan looked up at the arching concrete waffle-pattern of the station’s ceiling and took a deep breath. Even fifty feet underground, even looking at a concrete overhang, even trapped in a tunnel with a hundred other people, for the first time in a very long time, he felt…free. His boss had given him some well-deserved time off. He—and his superior—believed he was off on a hedonistic trip to the Cayman Islands, where he would be doing unspeakable things for the next ten days. And by the time they noticed his absence—from the Cayman Islands, Washington and the world at large—he would be far, far away, in London or beyond, deeply enmeshed in a brand new, entirely fictional life and off the radar forever.

Forever.

“Enough,” he heard himself say.

It had simply become too much for him. Everything he had done, everything he had learned—and not just in Antarctica, but everywhere: in the UNED headquarters, at Langley, in nameless facilities in anonymous countries all across the globe…no, he couldn’t do it anymore. He didn’t want to.

“Hello, Jon.”

Jonathan stopped moving. Stopped breathing. He turned on his heel to his right, very slowly.

His body froze for an instant—he had to realize what he was seeing. He had only heard of the woman through conversation and had seen her photo. It was Takara, an Asian beauty and one of the most efficiently trained assassins in all of UNED.

Takara was standing five feet from him, looking him straight in the eye.

How did I let her get so close? he asked himself. A rookie mistake. I was just feeling…good. I let my guard down.

“You need to come back now,” Takara said. Her dark eyes flickered for an instant to take in the few other commuters waiting for the train. They were a fair distance away at the opposite end of the platform near the ticket booths. No one was even glancing at the two people having a casual conversation in the far corner of the station.

“How did you find me?” he asked, less out of curiosity than as a delaying tactic. He needed to give himself a moment to put a plan together.

“Your…reluctance…to deal with the project in Antarctica made us take a second look.”

Jonathan nodded. “Ah,” he said.

His hands were already in the pockets of his raincoat. Now he shoved them in even deeper and stepped away from the wall. He let his shoulders droop. He lowered his head and sighed deeply, the very picture of a weary, guilty man.

“I’m sorry, Takara.” He took one step to the side, away from the wall. Takara side-stepped in the opposite direction, careful to keep facing her renegade employee full-on. He was tense, ready for a fight.

A careful woman, Jonathan thought. Which was absolutely no surprise.

“It doesn’t matter,” Takara said, clearly uninterested in making a scene. “We’ll just go back to the office and sort this out.”

Sort this out was his unit’s special code for severe interrogation, followed by imprisonment until he was no longer of value, followed by death. They both knew it. His scheme was exposed. His lies were laid bare. The game was over.

Jonathan took one more step to the side, as if he was simply shuffling his feet in embarrassment. Once again, Takara automatically compensated, putting her long, lithe body directly in front of the corrugated concrete wall. Jonathan couldn’t help but admire the lightweight camelhair coat she wore. Beautifully tailored. “All right,” he said. “You—”

Without an intake of breath, without drawing back, and with his hands still deep in his pockets, Jonathan launched himself forward, straight into Takara. He hit her hard, butting her squarely in the throat with his upper body. It took the woman completely by surprise—I’m not the only one feeling overconfident, Jonathan thought distantly as he rammed her back into the solid wall and drove the air out of her lungs. He heard Takara’s skull bonk against the concrete like a bell made out of bone.

It gave Jonathan only a moment, a bare instant while Takara recovered, but he used it well. He reversed direction, pulled himself straight back, and dragged his hands out of his pockets.

In his left was a telescoping baton, a brutal variation of an old-fashioned car antenna, as thick as an index finger at its base. In his right was a man’s sock filled with nickels—a cosh and a bludgeon. They were crude, yes, but Jonathan’s experience had taught him he could never be too careful. Both weapons cleared their pockets with a single, swift snap of each wrist, out and up before Takara had fully regained her balance.

Jonathan attacked quickly and in absolute silence. He swung the baton and connected to the side of the woman’s unprotected head with a meaty thwack. As Takara’s head bobbled to one side, he followed through with the stroke, cocked his arm, and swept it back, using his elbow as a club and ramming it into her throat with all his considerable strength. He felt something pop in the flesh and muscle inside the woman’s neck. Then he used the momentum of his backhanded swing to continue turning his body, bringing up the cosh in his right and driving it deep, deep into Takara’s belly, doubling her over, driving her to the concrete, onto her stomach.

It happened in less than five seconds.

Takara’s mouth opened, but no words came out.

Jonathan stepped in even closer, partly to hide the weapons, partly to take the full dead weight of the woman on his clenched fist. He turned and shoved with his hip, then turned and shoved again, literally guiding the upright body to the edge of the platform. Then all it took was a push, a step back, a leg up, a foot flat on Takara’s belt buckle and a kick. Takara’s body flew back and twisted to the left as it teetered off the edge of the platform and disappeared into the sooty shadows below.

Jonathan stepped back from the edge of the platform—two steps, three-and pocketed the weapons. He took a deep breath and turned to see three passengers nearby. One was staring at him with open, wide-eyed horror. That didn’t concern him; the man was too terrified to ever give an accurate description. The other two, like most good DC residents, didn’t want to see a thing. One was in the process of turning away, hurrying down the platform to get as far from whatever was happening as she could get. The third had his back to them already. Nothing was happening as far as he was concerned. Nothing would happen.

Jonathan moved swiftly but calmly toward the stairs that led up to C Street. He would have to switch to Plan B, that was all. He always had a Plan B. And a Plan C. That was how he stayed alive doing what he’d been doing since a nice matronly woman came to his door at Cornell and invited him to join the CIA. Plan A was just the easiest and fastest option. He would still get where he was going; it would just be a little more trouble and take a little more time. That was—

“Jonathan!”

He stopped short at the base of the staircase. He turned toward the sound of the voice—a shout, sharp as the call of a bird of prey.

Takara was standing on the far side of the platform. There was a wide, black smear of oil across her immaculate coat. Her perfect, long, sharp hair was disheveled, and he saw a patch of blood coloring one cheek.

She was too far away to capture him. In the next instant there was the horn of an oncoming train, and as it surged into the station, it hid her from view.

Jonathan didn’t hesitate. He was out of the station and back in the bright sunshine of a spring afternoon before The B line to Pentagon City departed from Track 3 and gave her a chance to follow him.

He didn’t see her again, but he knew she would return.

Hayden sat in his own personal cavern and drank. And thought. And then drank some more.

He never felt dwarfed by the size of the place, even now, when he huddled in one corner of the secret, massive, four-story hangar. This was so much larger—grander—than the Oxford installation: the huge buttresses of the dome soaring over him, the vast concrete floor scattered with electronic gadgets of multiple sizes and shapes, some as large as cars. Somehow it still felt normal to him—manageable—even when the sound of his own voice echoed through the cavernous, deserted space like the sound effect from a bad horror movie.

“Check,” he said to Teah, who leaned and bobbled in the space across from him.

“I think not,” Teah trilled, her visual sensors focused tightly on the holographic chessboard that floated between them.

Hayden knew that. He knew her next move, and his next move, and her response three moves ahead. He just didn’t know why he continued to automatically, unalterably, refer to the ever-shifting concentration of metal and digital technology that ‘sat’ across from him as a female.

Teah was many things, but female was not one of them. Hayden was constantly upgrading Teah, so he barely gave her the proper outward appearance that more conventional robots were fashioned with. No silicone outer layer nor a proper adjustment of the wiring modules. In Teah’s mind she was female, and that was all that mattered.

“Andrew is calling again,” Teah said. “Something about a dinner you’re invited to?”

“I had no recollection. Ignore it,” he instructed. “You can’t get hold of me.”

Teah gave him the robotic equivalent of a non-committal shrug. “As you wish.”

He swept up his chipped ceramic mug from its precarious perch on a stack of broken modules and drained the last of the scotch from it in one long, grateful pull. He often wondered why he bothered with the intermediate receptacle; when he got in moods like this, he should just grab the bottle of Glennfiddich and suck it down straightaway. But no, he told himself as he filled the mug to the rim again. That’s what drunks do. Not me. I’m just a certified genius with a bit of a drinking issue. That’s what everyone says, anyway.

He looked away from the chess game, up and out at the three enormous platforms that always made him think of three cocoons. They were vast curved cradles, each one wider than a house, two of them filled with the curved hulls of his enormous, half-finished vehicles, all gleaming metal plate and bursting tangles of fiber optic conduits. They were his greatest creations.

One held a construct that was quite nearly complete; the gaps in its superstructure were few and far between. A few more parts and a few more hours of cybernetic assembly, then diagnostics could begin on that one, he knew. The other scarcely half-done, awaiting new components and materials.

The third cradle was empty. Clean. Nicked and scuffed from recent activity, but otherwise…abandoned now.

And maybe forever, Hayden thought as he took another solid swallow from his mug.

He tapped at a glowing patch next to the chessboard.

“No word yet?” Teah enquired politely. He had asked her to keep him company while he ran a set of benchmark tests on a key cavitation module; he’d even powered up the unit so it displayed an impressive array of twinkling lights and holographic status charts. But it was all a sham. He was running tests, that much was true…

…But he was running them, very quietly, on Teah.

His attention was pulled back to the chess game as she made the countermove he had expected. He knew she could have made it an instant after his own move, but she had waited what she thought was an appropriate amount of time before reacting, just to seem more human. He countered swiftly this time, just as he had planned. She responded with her own counter, equally anticipated. And now it was Hayden’s turn to pretend to stop and think.

Where does reasonable caution end and paranoia begin, he asked himself. He had to stifle a smile. Probably right around the same place that social drinking ends and alcoholism picks up the slack. Nevertheless, simply cautious or paranoid, drunk or sober, it was true: he didn’t trust Teah anymore. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he simply did not trust her.

So far, however, her diagnostics were clean. No hidden programs, no spiders or worms. Not even an old-fashioned virus. She was clean and in optimal operational mode. Everything you would expect from a seventh-generation AI in 2039.

Then why does she keep asking so many questions? he wondered. Why was she always there, whenever he was working on some crucial element of the project, and especially whenever his colleagues, like Simon or Andrew, were nearby or online? Why did she seem to be present all the time? He was sure—well, almost sure—that she had never been like that before; she had been his personal assistant, his companion and his AI test platform for years now, but she had never pushed before, never injected herself into conversations or decision-making.